In August the U.S. added 162,000 jobs, and women got 158,000 of them. Over the past year, working women went up by more than 870,000 and working men went down by nearly 1.5 million. Women now hold more payroll jobs than men for just the third time ever, and economists think it'll stick this time. The reason is mostly health care, which is doing almost all the hiring in the country, and most of the people it hires are women.

And Now, the Fake News. Except It's Real.

So the government put out the jobs numbers for August. That's the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They're the ones who go around counting everybody, and from what I understand they're pretty good at it.

The economy added 162,000 jobs. The experts had guessed a lot lower, so it came in nearly triple what they expected. Everybody was real happy for about an hour.

Then CNBC went and split it up by men and women. Women got 158,000 of the jobs. Men got 4,000. CNBC figured men's share came out nearly 40 times smaller than women's.

Now, I'm no mathematician. But 4,000 is a low number for a country this size. You could fit 4,000 guys in a high school gym, if they stood real close and nobody minded.

And it gets worse in the hotel and restaurant business. That whole sector added 62,000 jobs, and women gained about 68,000 jobs in it. So the business got bigger and the men in it lost about 6,000 jobs. Picture being a bartender at a hotel that's busier than it's ever been, and you get let go. You go home and tell your wife, and it turns out she got a raise. She'd feel bad about it, I'm sure. For a little while.

It's Been Going On a While

One month can be a fluke, so you look at the whole year. Over the 12 months through August, employed women went up by more than 870,000. Employed men went down by nearly 1.5 million. Laura Ullrich, an economist over at Indeed, told CNBC the gap between women and men is now at a level nobody's ever seen.

This started before August, too. Back in February, there were 200,000 more women working in America than men. Between February 2024 and February 2026, two-thirds of the 1.2 million new jobs went to women. In the last year of that stretch, men lost 142,000 jobs and women gained 298,000.

Go back to the early '90s and men held almost seven million more jobs than women. By this year that lead was gone. Seven million jobs. You'd think somebody would've noticed them leaving. When a dog runs off, you at least see the gate open.

Women have pulled ahead twice before, once during the Great Recession and once right before Covid, and both times men caught back up. Ullrich thinks this time it sticks. As of September, women had outnumbered men on the job for eight months running, the longest stretch since 2010. A fella at Indeed named Cory Stahle explained it to CNBC. Last time around, he said, men were losing jobs, and this time it's because women are gaining them. Which is a nicer way to put it, I suppose. For the women.

Everybody Works at a Hospital Now

If you ask why, you get the same answer just about every time. Richard Reeves, who runs a think tank for boys and men, boiled it down to one word: healthcare.

In 2025, the whole U.S. economy added 116,000 jobs, and health care by itself added 693,000. I had to look at that a couple of times. One industry put up six times more jobs than the entire country did. So if you take health care out, everybody else went backwards. They were all just standing around in the parking lot.

A Bank of America Institute report, written up by Axios, found private education and health care added about 800,000 jobs last year while every other sector put together lost about 500,000. Women make up 77% of the workers in those two.

It kept on going into this year. In January, health care and social assistance made 95% of the 130,000 new jobs, and the industry is now about 15% of all jobs, close to double where it was in 1990. In September, it was 23,000 of the month's 29,000. At this rate the only fella left outside health care will be the guy who drives the ambulance, and I'm told he counts too.

And who works those jobs? Mostly women. Nearly 80% of health care and social assistance workers are women, according to Indeed. Of the 1.8 million health care jobs added over a two-year stretch, nearly 75% went to women. Speech pathologists are 95% women. Dental hygienists, 94%. So if a man ever cleans your teeth, I'd go buy a lottery ticket that afternoon.

Men haven't moved in much. The American Institute for Boys and Men says men held 22% of health care jobs in 2024, about the same as the 23% they held in 1980. Forty-four years, and they lost a point. The group figures that at a 50-50 split, men would have almost half a million more jobs, and 56% of health care jobs don't need a degree. There is one job in there men will line up for, though. Paramedics are 70% male. I think it's the siren. A man will do just about anything if there's a siren involved.

Meanwhile, Over at the Factory

While health care has been hiring, construction, manufacturing and transportation, which are mostly men, have been flat or shrinking. The AIBM people are careful to say women didn't beat men across the board. The jobs just showed up in the building where the women already were. Reeves' newsletter says 77% of payroll growth in 2025 came from health care and social assistance, while manufacturing and transportation and warehousing lost jobs.

This goes back a ways. Starting in the early 1980s, the U.S. lost around 6 million manufacturing jobs. Health care took over as the big hiring engine around then. A lot of men, I guess, have been waiting on the factory to call back. It's been about 45 years. Might want to check that the phone's plugged in.

You can see it in who's even out looking for work. The labor force participation rate for men 20 and older was 69.4% in August 2026, down from 75.8% in August 2006. Prime-age women, that's 25 to 54, hit a record 78.4% in August 2024. Back in 1976, prime-age women were at 56.8% and prime-age men were at 94.1%. So for about fifty years one number's been creeping up and the other's been creeping down, slow, like a fella easing into a cold lake.

Meanwhile, at Home

So what's all this do to the household? The Pew Research Center looked into it. In 1972, wives were the main or only breadwinner in 5% of marriages between a man and a woman. By 2022 it was 16%. Another 29% of couples make about the same, and husbands are the main earner in 55%. Add it up and about 45% of wives now make as much as their husbands or more, nearly three times the 1972 number.

People haven't totally caught up to it, either. In Pew's survey, 48% of Americans said most men want to make more than their wives, and just 3% said most men would like to make less. I'd like to meet the men those 3% had in mind. I bet they sleep great.

As for actual stay-at-home dads, Pew counted 2.1 million in 2021, up from 1.1 million in 1989. Now, you hear "stay-at-home dad" and you picture a guy with a stroller and an iced coffee at 10 in the morning, looking like he does Pilates. Pew's 2012 numbers tell it different. Only 21% of stay-at-home dads said the main reason they were home was to take care of family, and 23% said they couldn't find work. Nearly half lived in poverty, a lot of them because nobody in the house had a job. So the Pilates guy is real, but he's the rare one. The more typical fella is on hold with the unemployment office, listening to the same eight seconds of saxophone.

Now, Before Anybody Gets Too Excited

More jobs doesn't mean more money, I'm afraid. Women make up two-thirds of low-wage workers, and over a typical 40-year career they earn $542,800 less than men. Men also still work at a higher rate in their prime years. In September, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio was 86.2% for men and 75.3% for women.

And these monthly numbers jump around like a fella who sat on a bee. In September, payrolls only grew by 29,000, and men got a little over half of that. Year over year, though, employed men were still down about 1.2 million and employed women were up more than 650,000. Ullrich herself told Fortune people have been putting too much focus on the month to month.

So where's that leave us. The hiring is in hospitals, home health and schools. Mostly women work there. Mostly men don't, and they haven't since about 1980. Reeves and the American Institute for Boys and Men keep saying the same simple thing, which is that men ought to go get those jobs. They're right there. There's a whole building full of them. Some of them even come with a siren.

The next jobs report comes out Friday, November 6. I'll be watching. I've got the time, apparently.